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BaseLang Review: pricey, but worth it

January 20, 2022 by Jamie 2 Comments

BaseLang is a Spanish-specific language learning service that connects Spanish learners to native Latin American Spanish speakers. BaseLang is special because it’s the first (though no longer only!) of its kind: unlimited lessons for one monthly price.

In this BaseLang review, you’ll learn everything you need to know about this resource: what you’ll learn, what you won’t learn, and if you should consider BaseLang for your Spanish language learning.

BaseLang review: comparing plans

BaseLang keeps it simple: unlimited 1:1 Spanish classes to get you to speak Spanish quickly. They offer 2 options (which we’ll talk about below) and offer you a free trial of $1. No fluff, not wild marketing schemes…BaseLang gets right to it.

From the get-go, you’re directed to choose how you’re planning to use BaseLang: either online, or in-person at their location in Medellin, Colombia. Unless you’re planning to relocate to Colombia, we’ll stick to online.

While we’re here, let’s talk about these differences, starting with BaseLang Real World.

BaseLang Real World

BaseLang’s Real World plan is simple: it’s basically a gym membership for learning Spanish. Pay one monthly fee, and get unlimited access to conversational practice with native speakers.

These classes are taught via Zoom, and are all private, 1:1, with native Spanish speakers.

Your lessons do follow a curriculum, but it’s largely up to you to decide your structure including when you learn, with whom you learn, etc. We’ll see what that looks like in a minute.

BaseLang Grammarless

If BaseLang Real World is your basic 24-hour gym membership where you show up whenever you have the time and take turns using the machines, BaseLang Grammarless is hiring a private trainer.

You choose your teacher and meet with them on a fixed schedule, and while a personal trainer can’t promise you washboard abs in 30 days, BaseLang guarantees zero-to-conversational fluency after 80 hours.

This translates to either four-hour days (conversational in a month) or two-hour days (conversational in 2 months). Very intensive.

And if that’s not enough practice for you, BaseLang Grammarless includes BaseLang Real World.

BaseLang teachers

If you go for BaseLang Real World, where you don’t choose your teacher at the beginning and instead basically use any teacher that’s available for flexibility, there’s somewhat of a process.

Here are your options for finding yourself a BaseLang teacher.

I do love the basic category options on the left in particular. Especially that gender option – one of my main qualms with italki is that you can’t search for teachers by gender. Apparently I’m not the only one!

Side note: in the above video, you’ll see the selected teacher doesn’t have any availability. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is because I was supposed to click the teacher in the left-hand column. That teacher was simply left over from the initial search.

BaseLang teachers have always had a little get-to-know-you video, but the newer (to me) bit is that bottom bar. That “Private Rating” part is SO helpful – last time I was active on BaseLang, you just got a list of BaseLang teachers to choose from, and you had to remember which ones you liked. Now you don’t have to remember!

I’m a huge fan of the option to favorite a teacher, too.

One of the problems I’ve run into is trying to get onto BaseLang scheduling the minute the next day opened up, only to find my favorite BaseLang teacher, and my favorite time of the day was already taken. That was WAY too much effort so I really like this fix for that.

You can now set up to 3 teachers as favorites. Favoriting a teacher allows you to schedule a lesson with them 2 days in advance.

Nonetheless, in past years BaseLang would just give you a list of the BaseLang teachers available in this time slot, and it would be up to you to go back into the section with their bios and descriptions and everything. Now they’re included right in this scheduling section, which is a serious improvement!

Once you’ve got your timing and teacher all figured out, there’s nothing left but to confirm your lesson!

Important note: BaseLang is known for its extra-high turnover rate, especially with its best tutors. Basically, if you love a particular teacher, they’re always going to be booked out until they just kind of disappear and you have to find a new favorite.

BaseLang review: scheduling a session

The first thing that happens when you go to schedule a BaseLang class is you’re asked to add the email address linked to your Zoom account – it also mentions that Zoom has a much better connection than Skype which is somewhat promising for me, as one of the worst problems I’ve had with BaseLang in the past is really bad connection.

Then you get to schedule a lesson.

In the past, you used to be able to schedule a BaseLang lesson by time or teacher, which I really liked. At some point, they seem to have removed the latter choice, so you can now only schedule a lesson by time on this screen; if you want to schedule by the teacher, you can do so in the “Teachers” tab.

One thing that BaseLang is proud of is the fact that you’re able to schedule a lesson at literally the last minute. You can also show when multiple consecutive classes with the same teacher are available. That’s HUGE! This option makes the BaseLang search so much more efficient than it used to be.

Just make sure that your time zone is correct in the settings tab, or else you’ll have to guess/hope that everything’s all set, and you’re not going to miss any sessions (which I definitely have).

The old adage of “beggers can’t be choosers” is usually pretty accurate in this scenario. While there are a surprising number of teachers available, you can’t be sure that you’ll necessarily hit it off with one of them, if they speak any English, or if you’ll enjoy your lesson.

Sometimes you just don’t jive with a particular tutor, it’s a normal part of finding a teacher in literally any scenario.

BaseLang review: Lessons

While BaseLang Real World is much more loosey-goosey than Grammarless, there is still a curriculum. This curriculum used to be confusing, but they seem to have simplified it a lot, which is great.

Under the “Lessons” tab, you’ll find Core Lessons and Electives.

Core Lessons are broken up into levels 0-9, from beginner to advanced, and are there to support your grammar education.

Each of these core lessons is broken into subjects based on grammar and/or vocab. Just click into any of these lessons that you might want to review and you’ll get some PowerPoint slides to click through.

From here you can see that BaseLang truly offers lessons from beginner to advanced – you can choose to follow this pathway as rigidly as you like, or not really at all, based totally on whether you prefer to focus on grammar or conversational skills.

These lessons aren’t particularly special compared to something you could find elsewhere, but it is nice to be able to reference the material you might’ve been working on in class that day.

Then we have Electives. Same layout and all, just some fun vocab to help you express yourself in your sessions if you’re looking for pure conversational practice.

These lessons are very interesting to me, but they’re clearly best used with BaseLang teachers. By themselves, these slides are lackluster at best. I’m guessing the intention behind them is to give BaseLang students some inspiration/conversation starters, in which case these will definitely keep the conversation flowing.

I know I said it before, but it’s worth saying again – I’m really glad that BaseLang made these lessons much more simple. There used to be an independent intro and all this frankly unnecessary information. This is much more helpful!

Interestingly, BaseLang has also supplemented these courses with their own Memrise flashcards. This makes it super easy to review the vocabulary independently, which is a great study practice.

BaseLang price

Whether you use BaseLang online or in person in Medellin, Colombia, BaseLang Grammarless is $1200. For an 80-hour program with guaranteed, that’s just $15 an hour.

Plus online learners get BaseLang Real World for unlimited classes thrown in for free. You quite literally can’t beat that.

BaseLang Real World online is the most affordable option. But if you need the in-person classes, that drives the price up. You do get the online classes thrown in, though.

You can see BaseLang’s updated prices here.

BaseLang alternatives

So, basically, BaseLang Grammarless takes the structure of Lingoda (and the intensity of Lingoda Sprint) and mixes it with the teacher-student relationship that you (at least should) get with Verbling or italki.

Let’s be clear about the difference between Lingoda Sprint and BaseLang Grammarless because they are both highly intensive Spanish-speaking courses.

Lingoda Sprint is a 2-month course (and only opens to new students every 3 months) that includes 15-30 classes per month (15 classes for Sprint, 30 classes for Super Sprint) and a guaranteed refund (50% for Sprint, 100% for Super Sprint) if you attend all of these classes. These classes happen at varying times with different teachers.

Lingoda also offers a couple of other less intense options.

BaseLang review: should you try it?

After this BaseLang review, I’m a fan. However, it’s not for everyone. They are very intentional about their preferred audience, which is great.

In particular, BaseLang is best for Spanish language learners (total beginners, if you’re going for BaseLang Grammarless; level doesn’t matter for BaseLang Real World) who are looking for highly flexible 1:1 lessons with a native-speaking Latin American tutor, whether in-person or online.

Is grammar important to you? Not for you. More interested in Castilian Spanish? No-go. Your time zones don’t match up (BaseLang functions on Eastern Time)? Look elsewhere. Don’t have the energy to work with a person (i.e. introverts and neurodiverse folks) for close to 100% of your language learning? Definitely not.

However, if you can spare at least $179 a month and are able to commit to a reasonably significant number of hours to learning conversational Latin American Spanish with a private tutor, BaseLang has quite a few options for you to play with.

After reading this BaseLang review, are you still not sure? Another super special feature of BaseLang is their negative risk guarantee: pay only $1 for your first week, and if you don’t like it, get $20 back.

On top of that negative risk, use my link and get $10 off your first month of online practice!

Memrise vs Duolingo: want vocab or grammar?

January 19, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

Two of the most well-known language learning resources on the internet today are Memrise and Duolingo. They’re pretty similar: both have vocabulary practice in a variety of languages, both have cute little graphics and motivations for being consistent, and both are available both on mobile and desktop. But what happens when we look at Memrise vs Duolingo?

Let’s address the differences between the two. Which one will work for you? Duolingo and Memrise both have their shining moments, and both have something that the other just doesn’t do so well. So let’s jump into it: Memrise vs Duolingo.

Memrise vs Duolingo: available languages

You can use both Memrise and Duolingo to study the following languages:

Arabic
Chinese (Mandarin)
Danish
Dutch
English
French
German
Icelandic
Italian
Japanese
Korean

Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

Memrise also supports:

Icelandic
Mongolian

Slovenian

And languages offered by Duolingo include:

Czech
Esperanto
Finnish
Greek
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian

Irish
Latin
Navajo
Romanian
Swahili
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Welsh

Memrise vs Duolingo: how does Duolingo work?

Basically, Duolingo is a free program that works in what they call “trees”. Trees are collections of little mini-lessons, generally ranging from beginner to intermediate, depending entirely on the language. More commonly-learned foreign languages have a lot more content to them than the newer additions.

Duolingo advertises the ability for its users to learn a language in just 5 minutes a day using Duolingo, making the time-commitment for learning a language feel really tiny. You go through each and every one of these tiny little lessons until you get to the end of the tree, and there are no more lessons to be had.

Duolingo mixes up lessons with both plain memorization and constructing sentences. Historically language learners have complained that Duolingo teaches languages through sentences you’ll never use; this is key to Duolingo’s strategy, but it’s not for everyone.

The point is, Duolingo will teach you to put sentences together in a grammatically correct way.

If you’re not an ultimate beginner when you start your Duolingo tree, you can just take quizzes at “checkpoints”, so you don’t have to waste your time learning vocabulary that you already feel comfortable with. You can just go right to lessons that are actually worth your while, which is nice.

It can be a little tricky to find the right level, though, since they’re named things like “City” and “People”; while the vocab introduced in those levels may very well relate, the grammar probably doesn’t!

Memrise vs Duolingo: Memrise courses

Memrise courses are heavier on the vocab side of things. Memrise has some free content but is more of a paid service than Duolingo (which is not a paid service at all, unless you want to get rid of the ads – more on that below). If you stick to the courses made by Memrise itself, you’ll learn vocabulary and a few key conversational phrases. Basically, simple rote memorization.

There isn’t really a strict system to Memrise content; they don’t have a tree to go through, or particularly intentional “levels”. If you want, you can go through whichever lessons you want at whatever time, though they are organized from ultimate beginner to intermediate-beginner.

Though Duolingo’s system of titling lessons is not totally helpful, they’re more helpful than lesson titles on Memrise! So, likewise, if you’re not an ultimate beginner, it might take you a sec to figure out where to start.

Like Duolingo, you can also set your goal to spend 5 minutes a day learning, so both Memrise and Duolingo are very attractive to those with limited amounts of itme.

Duolingo Plus

Duolingo now has its own paid service (if you’ve ever asked yourself “how does Duolingo make money if it’s always free?”). It’s a pretty wholesome concept: pay 10 bucks or so a month (depending on your commitment) if you want to:

Remove ads without an ad blocker (meaning Duolingo still gets paid, but you don’t see ads)
Use Duolingo offline
Support free education
Get unlimited hearts (if your Duolingo app is on the Gems system, not the Lingots system. I explain these systems a whole lot more in my Duolingo review!)

It’s a nice little option for you if you want to support free language learning education, which is an idea that I personally like. I’m all for financially supporting language learning!

Though, to be fair, there is a very widely-acknowledged theory that Duolingo is slowly but surely trying to push the Plus system. Draaaaaama!

If you want to try it out, you can opt for a free 7-day trial. But, again, it’s not a heavy investment, so if you’re going to be using the product anyway, I would throw a few bucks at it if you’ve got it!

Memrise Pro review

Memrise also comes with a paid option, Memrise Pro. Memrise Pro is a bit more bang for your buck, in my opinion. You’ll get a couple more tools to enhance your language learning:

Difficult word review
Video/audio files in Memrise courses
Learning statistics

The first two of these are definitely really helpful for taking in languages. Difficult word review is pretty self-explanatory: Memrise Pro knows which words you have a hard time with, so you have the option to study only those and shove them into your brain. It’s like Anki’s SRS system, but prettier.

The video and audio files are also a nice touch. It’s a step closer to immersion, learning your words by hearing a native say them, and not in a robotic way. It’s a decent way to start training your ear to hear the language, and it’s another method of learning the new vocabulary.

Honestly, it is a much better way to take in new words. I always recommend taking in new foreign vocab with more than one sense.

That being said, Memrise has a much heavier focus on vocabulary, while Duolingo teaches more grammar than anything else.

The statistics Memrise Pro offers can also be very helpful. If you stick with it, you can see what you’re studying, how often you’re studying, when you’re studying, and when you’re getting the most questions right. This can be a great way to shift your language learning strategy to one that works with your natural habits.

Personally, I prefer PolyLogger for this, though it’s admittedly not as complex as the above screenshot.

Duolingo forums

My favorite thing about Duolingo is the forums. The lessons themselves are pretty simple, but they each connect to a thread on their forum where members have talked about the questions. There are so many members that there’s a pretty good chance that any questions you may have about your lessons have already been answered.

In this way, Duolingo goes way above just simple question and answer and directs you to think more about grammar and how the language actually works, which goes into more intermediate and sometimes advanced concepts. If you still have questions, you can ask them yourself, and the forum is pretty active.

The Duolingo community is super helpful and has answered all of these questions pretty well, from what I can see. They also link to other resources online that explain these things well. If anything, it’s a good way to find this other helpful content online, so you can branch out on your studies.

Memrise’s member content

Memrise lessons themselves are decent, but they only go so far. Fortunately, Memrise isn’t just a language learning resource, but also just your basic flashcard app, so members have created flashcards for the words and phrases that they’re learning outside of Memrise itself.

So, depending on your language of choice, you might find the vocab or grammar that you’re looking for either in the Memrise courses themselves or in the member-generated content. There’s lots and lots of content, so you can take in almost endless amounts of vocab just on Memrise.

And, since it’s a flashcard app, it will probably never stop growing. So keep an eye out for new decks, and even make your own decks to share with the world. Where Duolingo is limited to the lessons they create themselves, Memrise grows whenever members share their own content. That’s a lot of vocab for you to learn, so if you want to stick with it, you can go far!

Duolingo app review

It’s hard to find another website that does desktop and mobile as well as Duolingo. It’s definitely built to go wherever you go, so Duolingo’s app is convenient and easy for your eyes. It’s actually meant to be more of a mobile app, so that’s where you’ll get your push notifications reminding you to get your studying in every day.

Now that the Duolingo app also links to the forums in every question, it’s also a much more convenient way to find explanations or common complaints about any particular problem.

It’s super seamless, so you don’t have to think about it at all – just let the app remind you every day to get your studying in and keep up your streak. The more you get back to it, the more you learn! Perfect for the more easily distractible and forgetful language learners.

Memrise app review

The Memrise app used to be awful, but fortunately, they’ve stepped up and made it MUCH more user-friendly. Now it’s nice and smooth to compete with the Duolingo app, complete with cute little sounds, vibrations when you answer a question incorrectly, and seamless integration with what you’re doing on desktop.

However, there’s still one hiccup with the Memrise app: you can’t access your statistics! If seeing your journey and growth is important to you, I hope you’re on a computer a lot, because you just straight-up can’t see them on the Memrise app.

Memrise vs Duolingo: Memrise paid app screenshot

On top of that is the section where they talk about Memrise Pro. Yes, while you’re on the free version, I absolutely understand pushing the paid content. That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is when you do pay for Memrise Pro, and not only does that section stay the same, but it doesn’t link to paid content! It literally just says that you’re a subscriber, and reminds you what you get.

Memrise vs Duolingo

Comparing Duolingo vs Memrise…whichever one you use definitely depends on your needs: vocab? Grammar? Creating your own study materials? A clearly defined path? Input and questions from other users? These factors can easily define your choice of Memrise vs Duolingo.

They’re both simple tools to play with from day to day, complete with daily notifications to keep you motivated in the short term and fun graphics and sounds. But, if you’re looking for more CEFR-based help (content structured along the same lines as official assessments), Duolingo is a bit more structured.

However, if content is king for you, Memrise is a great option for Duolingo alternatives. As long as people use Memrise, the amount of content you can find on it will never stop. If you’ve got a desk job like most of us, it’s not hard to keep a tab open to Memrise and drill new and old vocab in your downtime. Not a bad way to take in new words if you ask me!

Click here to get started with Duolingo, or here to start Memrise.

Duolingo Review: how to use Duolingo in 2023

January 19, 2022 by Jamie 2 Comments

Ah, Duolingo. The internet’s most famous place to study foreign languages. It’s cute, it’s bite-sized, and it makes you feel good. All that surface-level stuff aside, does Duolingo work? Is Duolingo good for all types of language learners? We’ll discuss in this Duolingo review.

And if Duolingo is the answer for you, how do you take advantage of everything that it has to offer (which is a lot)? That’s where this Duolingo review comes in.

How to use Duolingo

The first question for this Duolingo review: is Duolingo effective? It can be, as long as you understand what it’s used for. What I mean by that is Duolingo does not offer conversational practice, any independent speaking, reading, or writing. There’s a teeny tiny bit of listening when you’re learning the words, but that’s about it.

1. Overview of Duolingo
2. Lingots
3. Duolingo’s learning path
4. Other features
5. Duolingo Leagues
6. Duolingo Achievements
7. Super Duolingo
8. Duolingo alternatives

That being said, the question of “how effective is Duolingo” is…a mixed bag. For what it does, it can be very effective! Because of the tools it provides (i.e. reminders, gamification, competition), Duolingo is effective for:

Learning beginner vocab and beginner-intermediate grammar (in some languages)
Forming a daily habit
Making language learning fun
Creating competition

And, most importantly, making language learning free and accessible to all.

You’re not going to get conversational using just Duolingo, but you can easily get a very solid base in the language, with which you can search elsewhere in the world for more advanced concepts and actually practice your fluency.

Duolingo can be a great start for your language learning in a variety of languages. The languages you can find on Duolingo include:

Arabic
Chinese
Creole
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Korean

Latin
Navajo
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Scottish Gaelic
Spanish
Swahili
Swedish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Welsh
Yiddish

Duolingo also offers fantasy languages, like Klingon and High Valyrian; suffice to say, you’re more than covered for language learning inspo.

How does Duolingo work?

Duolingo works by providing you with a bunch of little, incremental lessons that are easy to consume, and constantly giving you positive reinforcement via adorable sound effects, awards, and notifications. It absolutely is addicting, and that’s their MO. They get you addicted to coming back and spending even just 5 minutes with them.

On top of that, with Leagues and XP, you can use Duolingo to find motivation via competition against other language learners regardless of target language, goals, and skill level. I’ll go more in-depth about this later.

Lingots

“Lingots”(pronounced ling-guhts) are Duolingo’s currency. You earn lingots by:

earning crowns in any skill
finishing any skill
practicing
continuing a streak for a specific number of days
finishing a League in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd place

When you only have to study on Duolingo for 5 minutes a day, it’s really not hard to see why you’d keep coming back. This is why Duolingo depends heavily on Lingots to keep Duolingo users hooked.

With these lingots, you can buy:

streak freezes (if you forget to come back one day, you won’t lose your current streak) (
double or nothing (double your wager if you maintain a 7-day streak)
extra minutes in timed practices
hearts (AKA more practice)

In the past, lingots could be used to buy several other things as well, like outfits for Duo the owl. However, today your options are limited, and this is one of the many updates to Duolingo that users are not happy about.

For free Duolingo users, “hearts” also play a major part in the Duolingo experience; you automatically get 5 hearts; whenever you get a question wrong, you lose a heart.

You can keep learning until you get 5 wrong, and lose all 5 hearts. Once you lose all your hearts, you have three options:

quit playing and wait to get 1 heart every 5 hours
buy more hearts with lingots
earn 1 heart by practicing old skills
get Duolingo plus (to be explained later)

Duolingo review: the learning path

Duolingo teaches languages by way of a learning path. These learning paths are made up of bite-sized lessons collected together and organized by skill. Because Duolingo is as gamified as it is, and these lessons are so easy to swallow, it’s not hard to push yourself to learn more and more; not only that, but Duolingo has so many adorable little achievements and reminders that it’s easy to stay in the habit, which is awesome.

Unfortunately, even though these lessons are based on grammatical concepts, they’re not named specifically based on that. For example, the “City” skill doesn’t teach you the name of cities, but words like “store”, “small”, “school”, etc. Kind of confusing. I wish they took the LingoDeer approach of having lesson titles match up with the actual lessons.

Here you can see a lesson about “changes” under the unit about places being…neither of those.

These skills are organized by level, and for the more extensive languages (namely Spanish and French), Duolingo will ease you into a more and more advanced understanding of the language.

For the more extensive languages, there are 5 crowns per skill (on mobile you may have 6 crowns per skill, the last crown, “Legendary”, being a review worth 40 XP). Each of these crowns is broken up into 5 levels, and each of those levels has 10 questions each.

One of the things to keep in mind with Duolingo is that even though there are a ton of languages to learn, not all of them are as complete as some of the more common foreign languages.

That said, more commonly learned languages like Spanish have a significantly longer learning path than something like Finnish.

Regardless of the language, Duolingo is best for language learners with little to no experience in a given language. If you’re an intermediate learner of the more commonly-learned languages, you may also find Duolingo valuable.

This is because of the “Checkpoint” feature of Duolingo. If you’re not a total beginner of the language, you can take and pass Checkpoint Challenges to show Duolingo what you know, and get to the lessons that’ll actually be beneficial to you.

Again, this does depend on the language you’re learning, as well as your abilities. These Checkpoint Challenges are not easy – simple mistakes make a big difference.

Otherwise, Duolingo’s learning path guides you one lesson at a time. Many users complain that they’d like more choices as to what they’re learning at any given time; if you don’t want to take that particular lesson, you’re stuck.

There are other things to do in Duolingo that are not connected to the learning path to give you something else to do, like separate speaking/listening exercises.

Duolingo review: other options

In the past, Duolingo offered users more options: which skills to learn, when to learn them, and how many repetitions they want. With the new learning path, those options are totally gone; users must take the next lesson, or else they can’t move on.

For Super Duolingo users (i.e. paid members) on mobile devices, there are a couple of other options. Timed practice, for example, has users review vocab at breakneck speeds to earn more XP and get to the top of the League leaderboards.

Users might also find timed practice with more advanced content, like translating to transcription (listen to an audio clip and write down what they’re saying).

Suffice to say, Duolingo truly changes things up (albeit inconsistently – they’re known for their A/B testing, so it may take a while for updated exercises to hit your account).

Here’s a tip for you if you want to use Duolingo: try to focus on these kinds of comprehension questions, if you can:

These are excellent because they lead users to use their language skills together with their critical thinking skills to check for understanding.

Simple, brainless, matching exercises will only take you so far, so I’m glad to see these more complex exercises.

As you continue through Duolingo’s learning path, you’ll also work through Duolingo Stories; again, this is one of their better features for genuinely building comprehension skills in an engaging way.

It is worth mentioning that you can commonly get questions wrong because of a typo that isn’t relevant to the actual thing you’re being tested on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten questions wrong because the sentence started with “Julie” and my phone auto-corrected to “Julia”. Super frustrating.

PRO TIP: add the language you’re learning to the keyboard on your phone! This’ll reduce the number of silly autocorrect mistakes.

Duolingo Leagues

Let’s talk about the competition aspect of Duolingo: Duolingo’s leagues exist as yet another level of gamification to keep you coming back to the app.

Everything that you do in Duolingo earns you at least 10 XP. You can earn more by not making any mistakes, reviewing your mistakes, or doing separate speaking/listening exercises (Super Duolingo users only).

This XP is used to pit users in competition with each other for the next week, based on when they started the week.

The purpose of Duolingo’s leagues is to motivate you to practice enough to get to the Diamond League.

Every week, you get pitted against 25 other Duolingo learners (regardless of language, skill level, etc.) who started their Duolingo week at the same time as you. You move forward, backward, or stay in one of 10 leagues from week to week:

Bronze
Silver
Gold
Sapphire
Ruby

Emerald
Amethyst
Pearl
Obsidian
Diamond*

Each of these leagues is a week long, which means it’ll take you at least 10 weeks to get to Diamond League. Competing against 25 other language learners, you have a week to:

graduate to the next league by finishing in the top 10 (plus earning lingots if you finish in the top 3)
stay in your current league by finishing in spots 11-20
get demoted to the prior league by finishing in the bottom 5

If you get to the Diamond League, there’s one more challenge for you: stay in that league for 3 weeks to earn all 3 pieces of the Diamond. It won’t be easy, though, especially at the very end. Some users use illegal bots to earn thousands of XP points just to earn the coveted award.

Achievements

As you continue on through Duolingo, you’ll get cute little achievements here and there. Things like following 3 friends, adding a profile picture, maintaining your streak for a varying number of days, etc.

There is one important achievement that really raises the stakes, especially in the Diamond League. This achievement is the Legendary award.

The only way to achieve this is to finish the Diamond League in the #1 position. This means that the Diamond League can get FIERCE! Not to mention stressful.

Sometimes the Diamond League is pretty chill and the winner only had 2,000 XP or so, and sometimes the top 2 players are fighting till the death, and the #1 finishes with something like 10,000 XP.

So yeah, it can get crazy.

How does one land this extra special achievement? I have a couple of tips (that don’t involve the bots that some people absolutely use to cheat) just for this Duolingo review.

Don’t start the league until the last minute
Leagues are events that restart every week, but timing can be a big deal. Think of others who are lazy or busy, and can’t maintain their streak until the last minute. Try waiting until the very last minute to join the league – you can even use a streak freeze to really put it off and still maintain your streak!
Check out the competition before you get too crazy
I’ve been in leagues where players have used bots to earn 8,000 XP in the first hour of the league. There’s no point in competing against that. If you find you’re in a league with players who are too competitive, maybe wait til next week.
Work through old lessons or a language you already know
If your goal is to get as much XP as possible, don’t worry about learning new things. Go through beginner lessons in your language, or if you’re already at an advanced level of another language, go through that tree. Remember, the specific language you’re studying has no weight in Leagues.
Take advantage of your free Duolingo Plus trial
Duolingo Plus means no ads. Take advantage of the time saved! When you ditch the ads, you save a few seconds each lesson, and that can really add up (or at the very least remove the frustrations of ads when you’re already stressing your XP).

Super Duolingo review

Duolingo’s thing is free education forever. There are no gimmicks, no surprise “if you want to keep learning, pay us!”, nothing, which is great, especially for a large, publicly traded company.

But as time goes on, more and more users have a bad taste in their mouths with Duolingo and believe that they’re trying to focus more on monetizing the site than focusing on providing a great, accessible language learning app.

Whether that’s true or not is not for me to say. With the free app, the only disturbance you’ll get to your language learning is ads. With the hearts system, you’ll also be disrupted if you get 5 questions wrong.

If you really care to get rid of the ads (as well as get a couple of perks), you can opt for Super Duoilingo. If you want to try it out, every account gets free access to Super Duolingo for 14 days. You’ll get to try out:

no ads
unlimited hearts (i.e. unlimited learning)
mistake practice (any exercises you get wrong)
unlimited Legendary (do an exercise and your final lesson turns purple)

In my opinion, sticking to the free Duolingo won’t break your language learning experience; however, if you find yourself using it a lot and would benefit from some extra learning tools, there’s no harm in using your free trial.

You can opt for Super Duolingo either in the app or on desktop.

Duolingo alternatives

If after this Duolingo review you’ve decided it doesn’t quite suit your language goals, what are some Duolingo alternatives?

If you like the heavy gamification (easy to use, great colors, and fun sounds/animations), you may prefer Mondly or Drops which are both great for beginners who want to build their foreign language vocabulary.

Or, if you like the usability but want to learn vocabulary that you’ve found or are more relevant to your own personal interests/goals, I’d recommend Lingvist or Quizlet.

Finally, if you’re learning a language from scratch and want a structured path but can’t deal with Duolingo’s heavy gamification, you can try Rosetta Stone or Babbel (this post compares all 3 resources!).

Duolingo review: who it’s for

If you’ve made it this far into this Duolingo review, it’s the moment of truth: will Duolingo help you learn a language?

Duolingo is appropriate if you:

want a simple way to practice a language
thrive off reminders and happy sounds
are just starting out learning a language for the first time
know absolutely nothing in the language

However, steer clear if you:

are focused on getting conversationally fluent
are looking for a high-quality language education
get annoyed by constant reminders
want to learn sentences you’ll use in real life
want explicit grammar instructions (not “figure it out as you go”)

Sold? Click here to get started with Duolingo!

Yabla Review: ugly, but practical

January 15, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

Yabla is a platform for language learners to find listening practice in all levels of the languages that are currently supported. It’s an awesome way to take in new vocab in context, play games, etc.

What does Yabla do well, and what are its flaws? In this Yabla review, let’s talk about what kind of language learners can really benefit from Yabla and who should give it a shot!

Yabla’s languages

Yabla has a ton of video content at every level imaginable, but it’s not available in many languages, at least not yet. Right now, Yabla is an option for those learning:

Chinese (Mandarin)
English
French

German
Italian
Spanish

These are all very commonly learned foreign languages, which makes it a great option for many language learners.

Yabla review: getting started

When you first join Yabla, you’ll get a kind of dashboard with a huge list of videos you can watch. It’s kind of overwhelming at first glance, but I suggest you start from the left-hand side, where you can choose things like:

collection (not really sure what that means)
difficulty
region
category

I recommend you start with “difficulty” and narrow down your search from there.

Make whatever choices make sense to your language learning and pick a video to watch!

There are a lot of random buttons and options and I don’t know what any of them mean yet (some sort of tutorial would be helpful here) so I just clicked one…and then was overwhelmed by more options!

On this 2000’s era platform, you can immediately see:

target language subtitles
English subtitles
normal options like fast forward, pause, slow down, etc.

From what I can tell, Yabla really wants you to use its platform to learn new vocab using their videos. So we’ll talk about that function before my preferred one: games.

Yabla review: learning vocab

In recent years, it’s been so much easier to learn a language with free videos with resources like Language Reactor and Trancy. Yabla, however, has been around for around 20 years now. So let’s see how Yabla handles things like translations, saving flashcards, etc.

It’s very simple, but it works.

It’s not nearly as pretty as something like Lingopie, and it doesn’t do things like highlight words you’ve selected, but it functions.

It’s also automatically set to autosave your new words as flashcards. There’s no confirmation or anything that it’s happened, so we have to leave the video and actively find the flashcard section to see what that looks like.

Again, this is perfectly functional, but an eyesore.

It’s fine that the flashcards automatically include SO much information, but flashcards are meant to be simple. Especially for beginner vocab like this, do we really need a whole paragraph from the dictionary?

Yabla may want you to use its platform primarily to learn new vocabulary, but it’s not better than (if not significantly worse than) more modern options.

Let’s move on to my favorite part of Yabla: games.

Yabla review: games

The thing that was super confusing to me when I started this Yabla review were the 2 orange buttons under every video: warmup and workout. There doesn’t seem to be a clear explanation as to what those are and when you should use them.

If you click over to the games section of a video, this starts to make more sense.

The warmup is comprised of 3 games: vocab review, multiple choice, and fill-in-the-blank.

As you can see, there is a small handful of vocab that Yabla expects you to learn from this particular video, and those words are the focus in these games.

I can see why Yabla has survived the test of time thus far; even if it’s not particularly kind to the eyes, this does keep the vocab interesting, and has you practicing it in a variety of ways (and not just vocab).

Using these words to exercise different language skills is a great approach. So far, I’m a fan.

So let’s see what kind of games are considered a “workout”.

The workout games include scribe (aka dictation), speak (shadowing/voice recognition), and recall.

They’re almost the same premise, but a significant step up in difficulty that is, again, exercising a variety of language skills! Scribe is a combination of listening and writing, speak is speaking, and recall is translating (not a necessary skill in my opinion, but you’re not obligated to play that one).

I told you that my favorite part of Yabla is their games!

And again, the platform itself isn’t great…I think if it was updated to look and feel like a more modern platform, it would most definitely be worth the price (more on that later).

Finally, if you just want to review the transcript (or print it) you can do that, too. There’s no audio linked to it, but you can click any of the vocabulary words to get a translation, which can be helpful.

Yabla review: lessons

While Yabla’s focus is vocabulary, they do have a collection of lessons. These are really just blog posts that connect some grammatical concepts to their already licensed clips.

Great in concept, I just wish they took the extra step to make these grammar points as engaging as their vocabulary. And if they were organized/searchable? Now that would be helpful.

In reality, these topics are random at best. There’s a search function, but I wouldn’t rely on it.

As of now, though, I think you’re probably better off using another website that’s more intentional about teaching you grammar.

For example, if you’re learning Spanish or French, Kwiziq is a much better alternative for grammar. For German grammar, I’d go with German Foundations instead.

Yabla’s prices

Yabla is a paid language learning resource. New users get a 15-day free trial, and then you’ll pay around $10/a month.

You can see updated pricing here.

Despite the aesthetics (or lack thereof) of the platform, if it’s something that you’re motivated to use consistently, I would say the price is worth it.

Yabla review: is it for you?

We’re at the end of this Yabla review, and I do have to say that I approve.

Yabla functions very well, and you will get a quality language education if you can get past the 2000’s era platform (literally, I don’t think it’s changed since they opened for business in 2005).

If you can’t, though, and you want the flexibility of choosing your own videos (Yabla licenses their own videos, so you’re stuck with what they give you), I would keep an eye on Trancy. It’s new, and I can Trancy being better and more accessible as time goes on.

Lingopie is another possible Yabla alternative – it’s not the most stable, but it’s beautiful!

And of course, there’s the crowd favorite, Language Reactor, which is super customizable but it’s missing the games and automatic flashcards that Yabla does so well.

Or if you’ve decided that Yabla is in fact the language learning resource for you, start your 15-day free trial now.

Drops Review: beautiful vocab for beginners

January 15, 2022 by Jamie 2 Comments

Drops is a popular language app, known for its beautiful design and quick wins. It’s similar to Duolingo in that it’s fun, easy, and addictive, but with more of a focus on expanding your vocabulary than building your grammar. Recently, Drops has also been bought out by Kahoot! to create an insanely fun resource. This Drops review will tell you more.

Read on to see whether Drops is the right language app for you.

Drops languages

You can use the Drops to learn a ton of languages:

Ainu
Arabic
Bosnian
Cantonese
Chinese (Mandarin)
Croatian
Danish
Dutch
English (American)
English (British)
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino (Tagalog)
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish

Italian
Japanese
Korean
Maori
Norwegian
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Portuguese (European)
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Sanksrit (for yoga)
Serbian
Spanish (Castilian)
Spanish (Mexican)
Swahili
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese
Yoruba
Pride

Drops clearly supports a variety of languages (and a handful of accents), and they’re adding to that list all the time. When a language app supports so many languages, it’s generally safe to assume that the content won’t get too advanced; that said, Drops is best for beginners of the appropriate.

Not only that, but Drops also offers this content through source languages other than English, making it a great option for laddering languages (i.e. learning a third language through a second language). This is a more and more common feature, and can be found in other resources like Mondly, Duolingo, and Glossika.

Drops review: the Drops approach to vocab

When you first log in to Drops, you’ll be recommended to start from the very beginning of the language. This first lesson will give you some simple vocab, and get you used to the Drops style.

Some features of this strategy that you can see:

when you’re presented with a new word, you’re asked if you want to learn it (whether you already know it, or if it’s an important term for you)
you’ll see the image Drops assigns that term to
this term + its imagery will be repeated a few times to get that short term memory going

I love this because you’ll never be led to translate your vocabulary (except the first time you see it)! This not only prevents the bad habit of having to translate words before you communicate but also opens up this strategy to any native language.

As you build more and more vocab, you’re led to differentiate between vocab words through the exact imagery.

And, as you prove you’re learning the terms with more and more correct answers, Drops ups the ante by making its questions just a little more difficult.

And that’s it. Drops keeps it simple. Very, very simple.

Drops review: what you’ll learn

First, you’re introduced to new words with relevant icons, and you tell Drops whether or not you want to learn this word. This is a nice way to not waste your time learning words that either you already know, or they’re so easy that you don’t have to spend the time studying them (if they’re close enough to English, for example).

You’ll get the English translation when the word first appears, but after that, tap the icons to see what vocab word you’re supposed to be translating. I like how this makes an effort to help you avoid the habit of translation and jumps right into just thinking in the new language, the thing that Rosetta Stone really rocks at!

Plus, you get the added bonus of hearing the word/phrase being said every time you review them. Very helpful for getting new vocab cemented in your brain and exercising your listening skills.

From the start, you can see where Drops really shines: vocab. While you can use Drops to take in your very first words, it also offers vocab to cover a ton of subjects:

Basics
Food
Travel
Relationships
Work
Home

Education
Hobbies
Outdoors
Wellness
Shops

That adds up to 11 different subjects’ worth of vocab, all of which you can access in over 30 different languages. There are no “levels” or “checkpoints” to meet before you can learn any of this vocab, so choose your own path!

Drops app review: review features

Learning new words is only part of the battle – the other part is review. Fortunately, Drops offers a few different options to review this new vocab. First off: quiz mode.

In this section, Drops helps you by tying the vocab to its meaning. This is unique, and adds some more context to your terms. Drops understands that context and meaning are incredibly important to learning foreign language vocab, and they’re helping you do just that.

Just unlock the vocab to get through 5 quiz questions, and play away!

There’s also Review Dojo, which you can access after you learn 45 new terms, through this review just seems to be regular Drops focused on previously learned terms.

Drops Premium

Drops is a free language app, up to 5 minutes to practice a day. If you wanto study for more than 5 minutes a day, you can opt for Premium. Click here for updated pricing.

Besides unlimited study reps, a premium Drops subscription also gives you access to their other, lesser-known language apps, Scripts and Droplets

Drops’ other language learning apps

Allow this Drops review to introduce you to Scripts and Droplets. Both are similar language apps to Drops.

First, Scripts. With Scripts, you can learn to read and write the alphabets of other languages using Drops’ fun colors and sound effects. Scripts can help you with the following alphabets:

American Sign Language
Chinese Hanzi
English alphabet
Hebrew

Hindi Devanagari
Japanese Kana
Korean Hangul
Russian Cyrillic
Sanskrit (for yoga)

Droplets, on the other hand, is very aptly named – it’s Drops for kids. It’s pretty perfect, actually; what kid doesn’t want to learn a new language by “playing with their words”?

Drops review: who should try it

Drops is a super fun, uniquely beautiful language app that helps to keep language learning accessible by offering not only a whole bunch of languages for one price but also two whole other apps. If you’re looking for a highly entertaining way to add a bit of vocab to your language learning strategy, I’d give it a shot.

However, if you want something with a bit more oomph – like building up to sentences and/or throwing some grammar in the mix – I’d recommend an app like Lingvist or Mango Languages.

Or, if you need a fun way to learn vocab but want some more wiggle room when it comes to the categories or types of vocab, maybe try an app like LingQ or Chrome extension like Language Reactor.

Either way, Drops is an excellent start for beginners of its supported languages. It’s gorgeous, works well, and keeps it fun.

LyricsTraining review: effective learning thru music

January 13, 2022 by Jamie Leave a Comment

The LyricsTraining app and website…well they do exactly as the name suggests! It’s for language learners to train their listening comprehension in a foreign language using the lyrics from popular music. That part of this LyricsTraining review is obvious.

And yes, while you could just go to Spotify and look up lyrics, LyricsTraining has a couple more options meant specifically for listening comprehension that takes using music to learn a foreign language to the next level.

In this LyricsTraining review, let’s talk about what’s to love, and what it could do better, so you can decide if it’s the right resource for your language learning.

LyricsTraining review: languages

LyricsTraining hosts popular, high-quality music videos in a ton of different languages:

Catalan
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Italian

Japanese (Romaji)
Korean (Romanized)
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish

That’s a pretty good mixture of foreign languages that are both very commonly learned (like Spanish and French) and not-so commonly learned (like Swedish and Finnish).

An account with LyricsTraining gives you access to music videos in all 14 languages (I love when they do that!) and even specifies which accent each song is in with a flag of the particular country the artists are from.

Very handy for language learners!

LyricsTraining review: using the app

Okay, let’s try this LyricsTraining review out. I chose Spanish not only because it’s my go-to, but also because it’s the only foreign language where my listening comprehension is advanced enough to try to listen to music.

When you first create your account, LyricsTraining sets your level at 0. This level isn’t at all associated with your actual level of listening comprehension, but how much music you’ve listened to and words you’ve “learned” (yes, I put that word in quotation marks for a reason, you’ll see).

So I clicked onto a video, pretty much at random.

See how this video is from Vevo? That’s always a good sign!

First I was given the option of multiple choice or karaoke; once I chose multiple choice, I was asked what difficulty level I wanted, each level of difficulty differentiated by how many words you have to fill in via multiple-choice; out of the 293 words in this song, I could choose to fill in 34, 66, 129, or all 293 words.

It’s kind of confusing to explain, but it’s a simple concept, don’t worry!

And there you go! This platform is really smooth, by the way, and I really love using it.

You play the music video you chose, and you get the lyrics all displayed, with however many words you chose redacted. It’s your job to listen to the lyrics and choose the right word. And with music, that’s sometimes easier said than done. Don’t worry – if you get it wrong, you can keep trying until you get it right.

Remember, music takes a lot of liberties with pronunciation, so a lot of these words sound completely different than they would in any normal conversation.

And because it’s music, it goes really fast. The lyrics do help, but with this app, you’re clearly not trying to understand the concept of what they’re saying, but individual words. I wish there was a way to slow it down and take the time to figure it out.

First complaint: give us the option to slow it down!

Nonetheless, this song was really good and I had fun listening to it and just tapping on the words. It’s a genuinely entertaining way of getting in some language practice! And if there’s one issue a lot of language learners face, it’s avoiding boredom.

And hey, if you need to hear the line a couple of times before you can try to answer (totally legit – even with my advanced comprehension, music is tough!)? No problem.

Swipe left to repeat it as many times as you need, or swipe right to skip it altogether. Let me reiterate: even if it is multiple choice, it can be tough to get the correct word the first time! Or the second time. Or third. (Don’t judge me.)

Or you can opt for straight-up karaoke, which is…exactly what you think it is.

If karaoke is your thing, this is a cool option that I haven’t seen elsewhere. It would be really cool to be able to put this on a TV or a computer or something (how awesome would foreign language karaoke parties be with your friends!?), but otherwise it’s pretty simple.

This way, you can focus more on pronunciation and moving your mouth in the right ways to form these words. Still lacking in giving language learners a chance to figure out what the song is even saying, though.

I don’t think LyricsTraining is as great as it could be (we’ll get there in a sec), but the part where you’re casually listening to foreign artists and training your ear to pick up on the words is honestly great listening practice!

Once you finish a song, you’ll get some very basic stats. I don’t personally find these particular stats the most helpful, but I know many language learners might. If anything, this could be great motivation. Green bars in stats = positive emotions!

That first stat, in particular, I don’t like. If you go into the “Vocabulary” section, you’ll find all the words that you’ve filled in the blank. Technically yeah, I’ve added 32 words to this list, but I didn’t choose the words, nor do I struggle with them.

This is not helpful at all for intermediate/advanced learners because, well, look at the words! That’s beginner vocab right there. I don’t need to review those words. LyricsTraining automatically pulled them for me for some reason.

It makes sense why these are the words that were filled in (something like the first 2,000 words of each language make up 80% of all conversations), but this vocab list isn’t helpful for me at all.

In fact, this part reminds me a lot of Beelinguapp: both apps pull out vocab that it thinks you need, based on pretty much nothing (considering this was the very first time I had tried this app), which is an unfortunately wasted opportunity to provide language learners with helpful vocab tools.

Not all of LyricsTraining’s stats are totally useless, though! They may be a little messy, but if you go into the “Activity” section, you get this.

Now that’s pretty helpful! Keep track of the songs you’ve listened to, how many times you listened to them, difficulty, success rate, etc.

LyricsTraining Premium

Again like Beelinguapp, LyricsTraining offers you a set amount of content for free, otherwise, it’s hidden behind a paywall.

Basically, you get to play music for free 3 times every 30 minutes. That’s a slightly strange way to measure free access, but at the same time, that’s a lot of free practice. We like free (high-quality) practice!

Or, if you’ve got $5/month to spare, you can get more out of your language learning.

You get full access to all the music your heart could desire, plus translations!

Now, the ability to translate sounds good, but what does that actually look like? Well, it looks like this.

In my opinion, this translation option is…meh.

On the bright side, you have the option to translate into a million and a half languages (not literally, folks) – no matter your native language (or even another upper-level foreign language), you can probably use it with this translator.

On the not-so-bright side, you can’t do anything with the words you translate. It doesn’t save it in a new flashcard set or give you the option to export it anywhere. If you want to save this word, you’ll have to do so manually, with your Quizlet, for example.

So, at that point, you’re better off using your own preferred method of translations, too. Which would render this tool totally useless.

LyricsTraining review: the verdict

At the end of this LyricsTraining, I find LyricsTraining to be a pretty decent resource. Exploring a language’s artists is a great way to not only practice the language but also get involved in a country’s culture, and this app makes it more accessible.

I do like both the fill-in-the-blank and the karaoke options – both are excellent strategies for building your listening comprehension and practicing saying the words (respectively). So if this is a language learning strategy that you enjoy and will help you build the skills you want to build, I’m a fan!

However, keep in mind that listening to music is rough. Even in your native language. Plus, LyricsTraining doesn’t offer a way to slow it down (which I don’t usually recommend with normal speech, but music is a different story).

The translation/vocab sections are left wanting, too. If you want to use music to find new vocab, you’ll be better off picking out that vocab manually and using another resource.

But if those factors don’t break it for you, give LyricsTraining a shot!